5 ms·

> There is exactly zero progress to make it scale in the last 10+ years. Lol, literally this week: https://taproot.watch/ https://taproot.watch/

by wyager 5y ago

noxer 5y ago
Taproot doesn't make bitcoin scale its mainly to increase privacy.
- wyager 5y ago
  Taproot decreases the size of multisig and other complex transactions significantly, in the happy path of a cooperative signature. It also enables Schnorr, which produces smaller signatures than ECDSA. It also contains features to further improve the efficiency of Lightning, which is a shockingly effective scaling mechanism.
  - simias 5y ago
    Lightning doesn't work because it either leads to a chaos of routing that doesn't scale or it ends up centralized and you lose the point of bitcoin in the first step. And don't bother coming up with hand wavy explanations of how it could work, some day. People have been talking about Lightning for years, literally billions of dollars have been poured into the "tech", the fact that even bitcoin enthusiasts barely ever use it is all the proof I need. I wonder how many more years of empty promises we'll have to suffer through before people accept that cryptocurrencies are a very good pyramid scheme with a thick layer of technobabble around it.
    - nednar 5y ago
      Well, the "pyramid scheme" + "technobabble" is not totally worthless, if it enables the investment of "literally billions of dollars" in otherwise totally unproven technology paths, doesn't it? Finally there is one area where people are really investing money into computer science! A cause to celebrate in my book.
      - prox 5y ago
        cough dotcom bubble. Seriously, investing money in a bubble is nothing to celebrate. That’s why it is called a bubble. It pops and many people loose their money.
        codebolt 5y ago
        Except this bubble is a bit more insidious because you have actors like Tether that are most likely creating a lot of artificial liquidity/demand. If there is a sudden loss of faith and enough actors start rushing for the exits, it will look something more like a musical game of chairs of who is left holding the bag of worthless Mickey Mouse dollars, by my estimation.
        prox 5y ago
        Absolutely, that is my biggest worry. And it has no true backing, apart from these pump and dumps. The single question people in favor of crypto can’t answer is the value creation. Now crypto is a natural evolution of certain monetary services and techniques, but at the core it literally does nothing of value. In fact, one might argue that that is its prime feature in its current state.
    - plebianRube 5y ago
      Weird Lightning works perfect for me, every time I use it. Low fees instant transactions. Maybe the trouble is in your trolling?
    - noxer 5y ago
      Daily reminder that cryptocurrencies are not == bitcoin All the problems with bitcoin are long long solved just not with bitcoin because its not possible to fix something when the majority (of hashpower) thinks its not broken or rather profit form its brokenness. FBA coins exists since 2013 or so.
      - normac2 5y ago
        Would you include environmental impact as a solved problem? My understanding is that Proof of Stake is the best serious option and that it's very controversial if it'll work.
        noxer 5y ago
        Solves as in it does not use more energy than what the hardware needs to process the data + it doubles every time you double the number of nodes (obviously since they all have to do the same work too) Its not wasting energy for a PoW lottery it just uses energy like a comparable instant messenger with global server farm would. The more people who use it the more energy it will use there is no way around that. FBA is completely different form PoS. It does not work on incentives and penalties it works with a global final state, global rules and (federated) byzantine agreement (FBA) for progress (adding the next "block"). No way to re-org, no block/staking reward, no censorship. If someone doesn't act in everyone's interest other nodes simply wont listen to them anymore. Not following the rules its publicly visible for anyone. And since there is no reward anyway there is no financial reason why anyone would participate who does not simply want to help the system.
        wyager 5y ago
        Proof of stake lacks the security properties of proof of work, e.g. via grinding attacks.
        AlexCoventry 5y ago
        Grinding attacks aren't a problem if you include secure verifiable randomness in the protocol. E.g., Algorand's VRF-based sortition, or Ethereum 2.0's verifiable delay function.
    - RazTeve 5y ago
      lightning works, at least you are having fun tho
    - wyager 5y ago
      Your entire premise is based on nonsense. People use lightning all the time and it works great.
  - noxer 5y ago
    Who cares, the size could be 10 times smaller and it would not make a dent in the scalability problem. Its a few transaction per second at max and it would need to be be several hundred just so people could move their "owned" bitcoins away from exchange wallets without loosing several % in fees. LN is not part of bitcoin and a total joke anyway.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lawn 5y ago
Segwit was also supposed to scale Bitcoin, and it turns out it was a massively inefficient solution, which took years to even reach it's lackluster potential. Taproot will in practice have an even smaller impact, as it only affects special transactions that normal people won't use. So yeah, it's not zero progress, but it's certainly not much.
- doomroot 5y ago
  Segwit itself provided an effective 2x increase in onchain transaction capacity and it fixed transaction malleability which was necessary for lightning network. Lightning network has 50,000+ open channels where payments can be routed without going onchain. Given the lightning network’s strict requirements to keep a node online & responsive, less you lose all your funds, I think that’s extremely impressive and shows a real demand for fast cheap payments. Now, in November taproot/schnor activates which gives us ptlc’s on the lightning network as well as makes a lightning channel opening transaction look like a normal single signature transaction, yay privacy. All of this lays the groundwork for the next major base layer change, in probably ~2023, anyprevout. This will give us “eltoo” on lightning which is nirvana. Eltoo removes the penalty mechanism which makes running a lightning node on a mobile phone or home node much more reasonable. Protocols take a long time to develop, especially ones where a miss-step could mean the loss of billions of dollars. Do not believe anyone telling you that their coin solved bitcoin’s scaling problems years ago.
  - noxer 5y ago
    Bitcoins scaling problem was solved by removing PoW/PoS and by removing the incentive structure (block rewards). As soon as this is gone there was no reason anymore why it would not scale like similar systems. Its basically limited only by how fast data can propagate trough the network. PoW/PoS was replaced by FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) Its not a coin its technology used by several systems and based on BFT (which is way older than bitcoin and bitcoin actually is based on BFT as well although maybe unintentional). FBA just adds the federated part so a decentral system can be build. While bitcoin instead used a work-reward lottery system (PoW) to decide who can write the next block rather than finding a block everyone agrees on. Its really not that hard to figure out which of these solutions probably works better and scales somewhat like a distributes system is expected to scale.
coding123 5y ago
Bitcoin doesn't scale. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Just watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDKntG4F0hg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDKntG4F0hg So in about 5 years pretend everyone in the United States melts a wrench like that... Then a month later they do that twice, a month later they do it three times. Hey, at least it will be fun.
- Shosty123 5y ago
  Why does every discussion about Bitcoin's environmental impact reduce to "it uses a lot of electricity therefore it should be stopped". We're not going to shut down entire sectors of the economy because of their environmental impact. People are going to innovate and invest in alternative sources of energy because it is becoming profitable to do so. The solution is hardly ever "just stop doing it", it's "how can we do this better".
  - noxer 5y ago
    It has been "done better" in 2013 or so when the first FBA system where created as an direct answer to bitcoins expected future environmental impact and scalability problems. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27596590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27596590
  - codebolt 5y ago
    Crypto is hardly a "sector of the economy". It's main utility right now is lining the pockets of a few speculators. Traditional centralized ledgering systems do everything crypto does better and with a fraction of the energy use. It also gives governments tools to combat inflation/deflation and manage counterparty risks within the system. Crypto is a neat idea, but in the end it doesn't really solve anything, and instead only introduces a lot of unnecessary problems.
    - Shosty123 5y ago
      It pains me to see how someone could see no value in having a medium of exchange outside of any government currency control. One of my ex-coworkers had his family's fortune wiped out twice in Argentina due to government seizure and hyperinflation before they fled to Canada.
uncletammy 5y ago
Oh good, BTC can finally support Schnorr signatures, a feature that been available on BCH for years now. A feature that is useless until wallet developers add Schnorr signing functionality. Taproot is the update we get after ten years of the BTC devs doing nothing except gaslighting users about the protocol's scalability? All that momentum wasted.
- ric2b 5y ago
  > Schnorr signatures, a feature that been available on BCH for years now. Not in a useful way: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/l8v8sa/heres_a_6of9_schnorr_multisig_transaction_created/glf925h/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/l8v8sa/heres_a_6of9_sc...

> There is exactly zero progress to make it scale in the last 10+ years. Lol, literally this week: https://taproot.watch/ https://taproot.watch/

by wyager 5y ago

> There is exactly zero progress to make it scale in the last 10+ years. Lol, literally this week: https://taproot.watch/ https://taproot.watch/

noxer 5y ago

Taproot doesn't make bitcoin scale its mainly to increase privacy.

wyager 5y ago
Taproot decreases the size of multisig and other complex transactions significantly, in the happy path of a cooperative signature. It also enables Schnorr, which produces smaller signatures than ECDSA. It also contains features to further improve the efficiency of Lightning, which is a shockingly effective scaling mechanism.
- simias 5y ago
  Lightning doesn't work because it either leads to a chaos of routing that doesn't scale or it ends up centralized and you lose the point of bitcoin in the first step. And don't bother coming up with hand wavy explanations of how it could work, some day. People have been talking about Lightning for years, literally billions of dollars have been poured into the "tech", the fact that even bitcoin enthusiasts barely ever use it is all the proof I need. I wonder how many more years of empty promises we'll have to suffer through before people accept that cryptocurrencies are a very good pyramid scheme with a thick layer of technobabble around it.
  - nednar 5y ago
    Well, the "pyramid scheme" + "technobabble" is not totally worthless, if it enables the investment of "literally billions of dollars" in otherwise totally unproven technology paths, doesn't it? Finally there is one area where people are really investing money into computer science! A cause to celebrate in my book.
    - prox 5y ago
      cough dotcom bubble. Seriously, investing money in a bubble is nothing to celebrate. That’s why it is called a bubble. It pops and many people loose their money.
      - codebolt 5y ago
        Except this bubble is a bit more insidious because you have actors like Tether that are most likely creating a lot of artificial liquidity/demand. If there is a sudden loss of faith and enough actors start rushing for the exits, it will look something more like a musical game of chairs of who is left holding the bag of worthless Mickey Mouse dollars, by my estimation.
        prox 5y ago
        Absolutely, that is my biggest worry. And it has no true backing, apart from these pump and dumps. The single question people in favor of crypto can’t answer is the value creation. Now crypto is a natural evolution of certain monetary services and techniques, but at the core it literally does nothing of value. In fact, one might argue that that is its prime feature in its current state.
  - plebianRube 5y ago
    Weird Lightning works perfect for me, every time I use it. Low fees instant transactions. Maybe the trouble is in your trolling?
  - noxer 5y ago
    Daily reminder that cryptocurrencies are not == bitcoin All the problems with bitcoin are long long solved just not with bitcoin because its not possible to fix something when the majority (of hashpower) thinks its not broken or rather profit form its brokenness. FBA coins exists since 2013 or so.
    - normac2 5y ago
      Would you include environmental impact as a solved problem? My understanding is that Proof of Stake is the best serious option and that it's very controversial if it'll work.
      - noxer 5y ago
        Solves as in it does not use more energy than what the hardware needs to process the data + it doubles every time you double the number of nodes (obviously since they all have to do the same work too) Its not wasting energy for a PoW lottery it just uses energy like a comparable instant messenger with global server farm would. The more people who use it the more energy it will use there is no way around that. FBA is completely different form PoS. It does not work on incentives and penalties it works with a global final state, global rules and (federated) byzantine agreement (FBA) for progress (adding the next "block"). No way to re-org, no block/staking reward, no censorship. If someone doesn't act in everyone's interest other nodes simply wont listen to them anymore. Not following the rules its publicly visible for anyone. And since there is no reward anyway there is no financial reason why anyone would participate who does not simply want to help the system.
      - wyager 5y ago
        Proof of stake lacks the security properties of proof of work, e.g. via grinding attacks.
        AlexCoventry 5y ago
        Grinding attacks aren't a problem if you include secure verifiable randomness in the protocol. E.g., Algorand's VRF-based sortition, or Ethereum 2.0's verifiable delay function.
  - RazTeve 5y ago
    lightning works, at least you are having fun tho
  - wyager 5y ago
    Your entire premise is based on nonsense. People use lightning all the time and it works great.
- noxer 5y ago
  Who cares, the size could be 10 times smaller and it would not make a dent in the scalability problem. Its a few transaction per second at max and it would need to be be several hundred just so people could move their "owned" bitcoins away from exchange wallets without loosing several % in fees. LN is not part of bitcoin and a total joke anyway.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lawn 5y ago

Segwit was also supposed to scale Bitcoin, and it turns out it was a massively inefficient solution, which took years to even reach it's lackluster potential. Taproot will in practice have an even smaller impact, as it only affects special transactions that normal people won't use. So yeah, it's not zero progress, but it's certainly not much.

doomroot 5y ago
Segwit itself provided an effective 2x increase in onchain transaction capacity and it fixed transaction malleability which was necessary for lightning network. Lightning network has 50,000+ open channels where payments can be routed without going onchain. Given the lightning network’s strict requirements to keep a node online & responsive, less you lose all your funds, I think that’s extremely impressive and shows a real demand for fast cheap payments. Now, in November taproot/schnor activates which gives us ptlc’s on the lightning network as well as makes a lightning channel opening transaction look like a normal single signature transaction, yay privacy. All of this lays the groundwork for the next major base layer change, in probably ~2023, anyprevout. This will give us “eltoo” on lightning which is nirvana. Eltoo removes the penalty mechanism which makes running a lightning node on a mobile phone or home node much more reasonable. Protocols take a long time to develop, especially ones where a miss-step could mean the loss of billions of dollars. Do not believe anyone telling you that their coin solved bitcoin’s scaling problems years ago.
- noxer 5y ago
  Bitcoins scaling problem was solved by removing PoW/PoS and by removing the incentive structure (block rewards). As soon as this is gone there was no reason anymore why it would not scale like similar systems. Its basically limited only by how fast data can propagate trough the network. PoW/PoS was replaced by FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) Its not a coin its technology used by several systems and based on BFT (which is way older than bitcoin and bitcoin actually is based on BFT as well although maybe unintentional). FBA just adds the federated part so a decentral system can be build. While bitcoin instead used a work-reward lottery system (PoW) to decide who can write the next block rather than finding a block everyone agrees on. Its really not that hard to figure out which of these solutions probably works better and scales somewhat like a distributes system is expected to scale.

coding123 5y ago

Bitcoin doesn't scale. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Just watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDKntG4F0hg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDKntG4F0hg So in about 5 years pretend everyone in the United States melts a wrench like that... Then a month later they do that twice, a month later they do it three times. Hey, at least it will be fun.

Shosty123 5y ago
Why does every discussion about Bitcoin's environmental impact reduce to "it uses a lot of electricity therefore it should be stopped". We're not going to shut down entire sectors of the economy because of their environmental impact. People are going to innovate and invest in alternative sources of energy because it is becoming profitable to do so. The solution is hardly ever "just stop doing it", it's "how can we do this better".
- noxer 5y ago
  It has been "done better" in 2013 or so when the first FBA system where created as an direct answer to bitcoins expected future environmental impact and scalability problems. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27596590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27596590
- codebolt 5y ago
  Crypto is hardly a "sector of the economy". It's main utility right now is lining the pockets of a few speculators. Traditional centralized ledgering systems do everything crypto does better and with a fraction of the energy use. It also gives governments tools to combat inflation/deflation and manage counterparty risks within the system. Crypto is a neat idea, but in the end it doesn't really solve anything, and instead only introduces a lot of unnecessary problems.
  - Shosty123 5y ago
    It pains me to see how someone could see no value in having a medium of exchange outside of any government currency control. One of my ex-coworkers had his family's fortune wiped out twice in Argentina due to government seizure and hyperinflation before they fled to Canada.

uncletammy 5y ago

Oh good, BTC can finally support Schnorr signatures, a feature that been available on BCH for years now. A feature that is useless until wallet developers add Schnorr signing functionality. Taproot is the update we get after ten years of the BTC devs doing nothing except gaslighting users about the protocol's scalability? All that momentum wasted.

ric2b 5y ago
> Schnorr signatures, a feature that been available on BCH for years now. Not in a useful way: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/l8v8sa/heres_a_6of9_schnorr_multisig_transaction_created/glf925h/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/l8v8sa/heres_a_6of9_sc...